By the time the review comes out, there would have been entire novels worth of words written about the omissions and falsehoods of No Man’s Sky. But if you erase the hype, the marketing, the furious fans, we’re left with a small little indie title that was released and has to stand on its own merits. So this review will look at the game that was released rather than drawing endless comparisons to the game that was promised. This is not really to gloss over the misleading PR that Hello Games and Sony have given this game. This has been covered by the community to an exhaustive level of detail. Instead I want to look at what we actually got, and how it stacks up and plays.
The initial impressions of No Man’s Sky are great. You start in a random planet, with the wreckage of your ship next to you. You must then explore the surrounding area to fix it, at which point you are able to leave your starting planet, and start exploring your first solar system. The second big goal is to build your hyper drive, make your first major jump to explore the subsequent system where you will learn the secret of how to make warp cells to further fuel your hyper drive. And these first few hours of play are great. No Man’s Sky has a hell of a strong opening. I remember the first time I looked a the galaxy map, and being incredibly impressed by how it just seems to go on forever.
The sense of Scale in this game is real, and its well done. You can truly feel the difference in speed of movement as you change your means of conveyance. What would take years walking might take hours flying at normal speed, which translates to minutes once you are boosted, and seconds when you activate your pulse engine. More than once I’ve activated a beacon to find a point of interest that is hours away, then gotten in my space ship, flown out of the atmosphere and used the pulse engine to make the trip in seconds. It feels great and it truly drives home the sheer sense of scale that a space explorer should feel.
There is beauty in the game. The systems can be gorgeous, and the worlds can delight and surprise you occasionally. Exploring a barren moon with the gigantic world to which it belongs hanging in the horizon is the stuff that that I could have only dreamed of as a child. Finding the a garden world with a vast ocean, tropical plants, and strange floating tentacle monsters inhabiting it, and then blasting off to a planet that could be a only described a winter wonderland made me admire the excellent art direction and uniqueness of the game.
But that was only the second system, and after that, the experience starts falling apart. No Man’s Sky’s gameplay has been described as a loop, in which you are really asked to explore and harvest items only for the sake of making specific numbers go up so that you can either survive to harvest more, or craft something that will help you harvest faster. This quickly becomes frustrating as you start with a ridiculously small number of inventory slots, exacerbated by the fact that if you ever want to make any upgrades to your ship or suit it will take a much needed slot in your inventory. The game will nag you to keep a handful of numbers up, making any exploration a slog to find the correct color of rock that will yield the element needed to shut that AI up, and ignoring everything until you find whatever material you were looking for to craft a warp cell and move on.
Suddenly the planets you explore become nothing but a collection of different resources you are looking for. Deposits of the isotopes you need to keep your equipment powered up, or of the materials needed to craft whatever it is you are looking to make at the time. The flora and fauna becomes just a source of income to scan. This feeling intensifies when you realize that what you are looking at is a limited set of assets with different colors. You will start seeing the same plants, rocks, even the same parts making up the animals you encounter very early on in this game, probably before you even leave your second system.
Defenders of No Man’s Sky claim it is a “chill game”. A game you can turn your brain off and enjoy. But it is not chill, and it doesn’t want be. It will yell at you when one of your gauges reaches even 75%. It will sic sentinels on you for harvesting resources. It will ask you to pay attention to flora and fauna. It wants you engaged, and yet, it is possible to fall into a trance as you perform repetitive tasks over and over. It is not “chill”. It’s mindless. Once you get into the groove of the game, there will be precious little new things to surprise you. This becomes especially true once you realize that outside of very specific situations, upgrades don’t matter and you can just focus on a couple of things to mine or discover.
There are paths you can follow, which can be interesting at times. For example, the Atlas path, which is what most people will follow, will have you going over to seemingly ancient ruins and fantastical structures. It can be initially interesting, but like most things in No Man’s Sky, it starts repeating itself after the first time, with some color differences. Never-the-less, working for this review, after about 15 jumps or so, I got tired and decided to try to get as far as I can to see if it would at least be something interesting there, but aside from the thinnest back story, I found nothing interesting to report.
The longer I played No Man’s Sky, the less I liked it, and for a game that is sold on its promise of an eternal universe to explore that is a big, big problem. The longer I played it, the more I started to notice (and be annoyed by) strange design decisions. Why do I have to hold a button to do ANYHING when there are plenty of scenarios where a simple press would have sufficed? Why do upgrades take an inventory slot? Why can’t I just buy warp cells? Why are all the buildings the same? Why do the sentinels attack me for shooting at a rock? Why do I have to learn the Alien’s language word for word from random monoliths? What is the point of feeding animals if nothing happens afterwards? The longer you play this game, the more cracks you will see in the excellent presentation it gave you during those first two hours.
No Man’s Sky seems reluctant to kill you and therefore also takes away your agency in weird ways. You can’t crash your ship. You can’t even get close to the ground to pull off daring maneuvers. Not that it matters, because any ship you will find yourself fighting won’t follow you if you leave your current area. If you are on a planet, they won’t follow you to space, if you are in space they won’t follow you to any planets or stations. The sentinel force that patrols the surface of the planets is laughable, but even if they were a threat, they won’t follow you into buildings, or into space. To be fair, I don’t know that any of that is a bad thing. The core experience is so bad that any added difficulty would have probably just added to the frustration. It is merely another example of weird design decisions that seem to have been made for no real reason or intended to connect to systems that never materialized.
No Man’s Sky was never going to live up to expectations. In that sense the game was doomed from the start. But it is a bad game in its own right. If you bought this game and loved it, and continue to love it, then I am happy for you, but if this game makes you like it less the more you experience it then I’ve evidently spent too much time with it, because everything about it just annoys me at this point. This is usually the part where I try to find a demographic that might like this this game, but the truth is if you like the kind of experience No Man’s Sky offers, there are so many games available for way less than sixty dollars that fill this niche right now that the only recommendation I can give is: don’t play this.
